Fear Factor: Cádiz

Jueves el 5

Today, my soup had eyes.

I have encountered and eaten many things that I never would have thought of even putting near a dinner table. I tasted sea urchin. Fish egg sacks. Things that still have their heads. I never had a mental thing with food, but I’m starting to get one.

Sea urchin was the easiest. It was during a pre-carnaval festival, and everyone was drinking beer and doing it. So why not. Like I said before, tastes like sand and dead fish. Had one bite, never again.

My madre puts this thing (I can’t remember the name, but I’ll ask again) in a lot of random salads, or just by itself. It is essentially an egg sack of some fish. It looks like a veiny ball, and it is filled with tiny fish eggs. At first, I had a hunch that that was what I was eating, but I couldn’t really tell since it was cooked, and so it was white all the way through instead of that vivid, orange color. I’ve eaten this many times, and I don’t mind the texture or anything, but it tastes like shit.

AND THEN, I accidentally ate liver. I thought it was a fillet, but after chewing a couple bites, I realized what it was. That nasty mealy texture. I will eat pate, like in a spread for toast or something, but I don’t like cutting up the intact organ and eating it bite by bite.

I think the worst thing here is that a) the majority of meat is seafood (which I don’t really consider meat) and b) everything still has heads/extremities. I don’t really trust mollusks or crustaceans, or anything that has a main diet of shit and garbage (literally) and carries its house around with it for its entire life. The problem is that every meal includes either one of those two, or fish, which I don’t really mind. It’s just the fact that all the fish still have heads and eyes, and all the mariscos (shrimp or monster shrimp the size of my arm) have eyes, feelers, feet, everything. I literally have to shell them before I eat them, and pop the heads off. Today my madre made a veggie soup, which I loved, but it had whole mariscos, which I didn’t love. When I say whole, I mean each one was cut into thirds, so some pieces had the ass, some pieces had the torso with little legs, and my favorite, the ones that have the faces and eyes still on that look back at you, point their feelers at you, and say “PWEASE DON’T EAT ME MAWA!” She told me to just chew them a lot, because the shells were still on, and she forced me to try them in front of her.

I am not down with that.